Bombshell. Lynda Curnyn

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СКАЧАТЬ breakups resulting from sexual mishaps weren’t the kind of thing I felt I could confide in him.

      So I described our demise as a couple as a desire for a “clean break.” “We didn’t really have the same goals,” I said, realizing that this was probably true. I mean, I did want to have a baby. Always imagined I would—someday. But I hadn’t realized the extent of my desire until the other night. Funny how something like a little broken latex can bring so much…clarity.

      “Better you realize that now, Grace, rather than later,” my mother said, turning my recent relationship disaster into a triumph, as was her nature. Though she had been happily married to one man since the age of twenty-five, my mother seemed to have a different prescription for happiness for me. “Besides, you have your career to focus on now,” she said, as she’d been saying ever since I had landed the Senior Product Manager position at Roxanne Dubrow three years ago. In her mind, I was the single career woman she never was. My mother had studied the cello since she was nine and dreamed of joining the symphony. But she had given up that dream shortly after her marriage to my father, settling instead for a life as a music teacher in the public schools. She hadn’t, however, given up her belief that a woman’s first duty was to herself and her goals. She never failed to tell me how proud she was of me for staying true to mine. “If the girls at Hewlett High could see you now,” she always said, referring to my rebellious youth and somewhat colorful reputation. If my yearbook had allowed for those colorful attributions of yesteryear, mine would have read, “Girl most likely to single-handedly destroy her life.”

      Yet now I was a shining beacon of success. Sophisticated. Cosmopolitan. Successful.

      Even my father gave one of his familiar murmurs of assent—it was the only thing that reminded me he was still on the line—whenever my mother went off on how exalted my position at Roxanne Dubrow was, how magnificent my life.

      I suppose it was pretty magnificent, I thought, once I hung up the phone and glanced around my apartment. At least from a real-estate point of view.

      I live in a doorman building on the Upper West Side. That’s code for mega rent, though mine wasn’t up to current astronomical rates since I had snagged this apartment almost six years ago.

      Six years. I had been twenty-eight at the time, and had just landed my first job managing my own product. Granted it was for a pharmaceutical company—not as glamorous a position as my current one—but I was jubilant. I finally had a salary fat enough to leave behind my third floor walk-up in the nowhereland of Kip’s Bay. I even had an assistant, though I barely knew what to do with her back then. I was moving toward my thirties still buoyant with the belief that I was entering the best part of a woman’s life, sexually, emotionally, financially. By thirty-five, I’d been told once by a college professor whom I admired, a woman usually has everything she wants.

      I looked around my living room, decorated in soft whites. It was the kind of space I had always dreamed of having: lush, romantic, inviting. I thought about the fact that just this past summer, at our annual company summer outing at the Southampton Yacht Club, Dianne had told me that she thought I had “vision”—the kind of vision, she implied, that upper management at Roxanne Dubrow appreciated.

      Yes, I did have a lot going for me, I thought. Then my eye fell upon two ticket stubs that had been left on the coffee table from the opera Ethan and I had attended the other night….

      My stomach clenched, and I ran my hand soothingly over what Ethan had once referred to as my Botticelli belly—like the goddesses depicted by the old masters, I was a bit more rounded about the hips and breasts than today’s waif standard. Yes, Ethan had always liked my body. Just as I had liked his. And it had been enough, I supposed.

      Until last Saturday night.

      What had I expected of him, really? I wondered, finally rousing myself from the sofa and grabbing the ticket stubs to toss before I hit the bathroom for my nightly cleansing and moisturizing ritual.

      I had expected nothing.

      And that was exactly what I got.

      “Morning Mist,” Claudia said when I stepped into her office the next day and found her gazing at a tiny glass jar with branding I recognized to be that of Olga Parks, our main competitor in the older woman’s market.

      “Morning to you, too,” I said, wondering at the gleam in her eye.

      Claudia shook her head, picking up the glass vial in one hand and holding it before me. “Have you seen this yet?” she demanded.

      I glanced at the bottle, hearing the reprimand in her voice. One of my jobs was to keep an eye on the competition, and clearly Claudia thought I had been remiss in this area.

      I decided to set her straight. “Olga Parks. Spring line. Two years ago.” I remembered the product well, as I myself had been seeking something to restore the dewy look that seemed to disappear just after my thirtieth birthday. At $65 for two ounces, Morning Mist hadn’t promised to restore moisture—that was the job of the $85 moisturizer it had been paired with. Morning Mist had more of a cosmetic purpose; sprayed on my face, it added a sheen that suggested I had run a mini-marathon during a ninety-degree NYC day. That was a little too much dewiness for me, and I had mentioned that in my report to Claudia, also two years ago.

      But my manager had already moved beyond ire to fascination. “Why didn’t we latch on to this concept? It’s pure genius!” she said, spraying the back of her hand and studying the resultant sheen. “Look!” she said, holding out her hand to me, as if the evidence were clear. “When was the last time you saw that kind of glow on your skin?”

      “At the gym. It looks like sweat, Claudia. Besides, aren’t we supposed to be focusing now on products for women who are still suffering from excess oils?”

      I saw a shudder roll through her, as if the very idea of catering to our younger counterparts disturbed her. “Speaking of which, where is our slick little admin this morning? It’s ten o’clock and she has yet to make an appearance. I need her to run off some sales figures for me.”

      I knew from the soft-spoken voice mail waiting for me on the phone this morning that Lori had been feeling a bit under the weather and was going to try to be in by noon. Though I detected in her somewhat despondent message that whatever ailed her was probably more emotional than physical, I covered for her. “She has a touch of a stomach virus. She said she’ll be in by noon.”

      “Girls today,” Claudia said with disgust. “Bunch of wimps.” She shook her head. “They’ll never be what we once were, will they, Grace?”

      And we’ll never be what they are now, I thought. Ever again.

      Not wanting to dwell on that, I decided to steer Claudia back to the purpose of our meeting, which was to debrief me on the corporate agenda that had been hashed out in the Swiss Alps. “I’m ready for the debrief if you are,” I said, eyeing Claudia as she gazed with a mixture of fondness and disgust at the pretty little jar.

      “Right,” she said, a look of resignation descending over her aristocratic features. “Well, first I should tell you it wasn’t so much a brainstorming as a corporate screwover. They didn’t invite us up there to come up with the new vision for Roxanne Dubrow, but to cram their new mandate down our throats. I guess Dianne figured her distasteful little plan would go down easier with a little sparkling water and pâté.”

      “Don’t tell me Burkeston finally got the go-ahead from Dianne on that product line she’s been testing forever?” Winona Burkeston, Director СКАЧАТЬ